"Starting Over" With A New Domain & 301 Redirect

[RCNOnlineMarketing]

Hello, SEO Gurus.

A client of mine appears to have been hit on a non-manual/algorithm penalty. The penalty appears to be Penguin-like, and the client never received any message (not that that means it wasn't manual).

Prior to my working with her, she engaged in all kinds of SEO fornication: spammy links on link farms, shoddy article marketing, blog comment spam -- you name it. There are simply too many tens of thousands of these links to have removed. I've done some disavowal, but again, so much of the link work is spam.

She is about to launch a new site, and I am tempted to simply encourage her to buy a new domain and start over. She competes in a niche B2B sector, so it is not terribly competitive, and with solid content and link earning, I think she'd be ok.

Here's my question:

If we were to 301 the old website to the new one, would the flow of page rank outperform any penalty associated with the site? (The old domain only has a PR of 2).

Anyone like my idea of starting over, rather than trying to "recover?"

I thank you all in advance for your time and attention. I don't take it for granted.

[RobertFisher]

RCN

There is no "penalty transfer" per se. It is just that those links will have no value, but you can still get people there. You could use 302's if there is some concern but don't really need to. Remember, you are redirecting a page and that is purposeful. You could also disallow the links to the 301'd pages if you want to be over careful. Again though, I would do the 301's and move on.

Best,

Robert

[RCNOnlineMarketing]

Hi Robert,

This was an answer you gave to a question I asked a while back, and I really appreciate it. I think we might go in the direction of starting over, since I am confident that we can out-content and out-SEO our competitors in the client's niche. Just a question about the 301 redirect: will the penalty associated with the original domain transfer to the new one if we do a 301 redirect? I'm not interested in transferring the page rank, but I would want people who arrive via direct traffic to the old site be able to be redirected to the new site. However, if a 301 is going to transfer the penalty, then I'm not sure how you get return direct users from the old site to the new one. Any thoughts on this?

Thanks again.

[RCNOnlineMarketing]

LOL, Cyrus. Yeah -- it just seemed like the right term. The client is a "bad person" -- she just put link building in the hands of people who used all of the methods that are now taboo.

And thanks to everyone's comments thus far -- it's all great feedback. Here's the other thing: if we were to start with a new domain and not 301 from the old domain, we'd miss a lot of direct traffic. The old domain goes way back, and a LOT of people hit it directly.

It also worth noting that the penalty the client has is not site-wide. It's keyword-specific In fact, the site is actually up for the year on non-brand organic search traffic -- it's just other keyword terms and not the bread and butter ones that used to rank high. Now I'm thinking that maybe we just work around the penalized keywords.

[Cyrus-Shepard]

Another way of saying it, when you 301 a domain, you redirect all the links that came with it. If those links resulted in algorithmic filters that resulted in loss of rankings and/or traffic, then there is a very good chance to visit those ills on the new domain.

"SEO fornication" - I like this phrase (although I hear they're trying to discourage this behavior at conferences.

[egorpe]

Here is the short experiment I did.

(A) I took a new domain and added it to Google Webmaster Tools. Google Webmaster Tools showed no backlinks.

(B) Next, I took old domain with couple of thousands of links and 301-redirected it to the new one.

(C) Couple of weeks later the links to the old domain started to show in Google Webmaster Tools for the new domain.

Conclusion: 301 redirect essentially transfers the links from one domain to another. If the old domain triggered a link based penalty, next Penguin refresh will penalise the new domain as all the links are essentially transferred via the redirect.

Do not use 301 to get out of penalty. Period.

[RobertFisher]

As to whether to change or not to change to new domain, you seem to be answering your own question:

Prior to my working with her, she engaged in all kinds of SEO fornication: spammy links on link farms, shoddy article marketing, blog comment spam -- you name it. There are simply too many tens of thousands of these links to have removed. I've done some disavowal, but again, so much of the link work is spam.

As to the 301, you are not moving page rank, but link juice. If, your intent is to mitigate the penalty via the 301, it will not do that. The "penalty" is the penalty. So if the algorithm is giving no value to a link with a PA of 50, by having the 301, you are not going to get that value. It will be the same as it was on the original site.

Now, if you want to just clean up and move down the road, a clean site and domain could be the way to go. You can do 301's, but anything that would happen to one will come to the other (someone will say: 301's lose X% of the juice so I will say it is usually not even 10% in my experience). But, if you are a PR of 2 in a non-competitive niche that is B2B, you may want to consider just going cold turkey if there are a lot of pages and hassles.

Use the new domain, add great new content, etc. Make sure your product pages are different and product images are different. Make sure you out SEO the others and you will likely see the PR get to two fairly quickly. In a non competitive area you can get a site to PA of 20 for a main page in about 3 to 6 months depending on content, etc. So, you are back at it and growing without the fear of complications.

Hope that helps, 
Robert